Friday, March 9, 2012

On March 6, 2012 FBI agents arrested five hackers alleged to be active
in groups related to Anonymous. They are accused of breaking into a
number of corporate and government websites and networks and sharing the
information online.

I could be described as a friend to Chicago-based hacker Jeremy
Hammond. We met doing student anti-war organizing in 2004, and I once
drove to Toledo, Ohio to bail Hammond and a number of other activists
out of jail. They had traveled to Ohio to protest against a neo-Nazi
group and been arrested under a draconian judicial decree that outlawed
any gathering of 3 or more people without a permit.

Hammond, 27, has been charged with one count of computer hacking
conspiracy, one count of computer hacking and one count of conspiracy to
commit access device fraud. Each charge carries a maximum ten-year
prison sentence. The Anon/LulzSec leader-turned-FBI-informant, a man who
went by the alias “Sabu,” helped the FBI track and identify Hammond and
other hacktivists.

Prior to his arrest this week, Hammond spent two years in prison for
hacking into the website of the conservative pro-war group 'Protest
Warrior.' That a fellow hacker was also involved in his previous arrest also has led to a fair amount of derision.

But Hammond was in many ways a person well ahead of his time. Groups
like Anonymous were practically based on the work he did and the
philosophy of 'hacktivism' that he touted. Hammond ran the hacker
training website Hack This Site and was a key person in Hack This Zine. Inspired by groups like the Electro-hippies
who take credit for crashing the World Trade Organization's website
during the 1999 protests, Hammond played an important role in promoting
the use of hacking for Anarchist causes.

In a video from the Hacker conference Def-Con in 2004, Hammond
describes his philosophy of “electronic civil disobedience” and
challenges the authorities’ designation of hacking as cyber-terrorism:
"Terrorism seeks to put fear into the population and hacktivism would
rather unite people, bring them together and empower people, to give
them the ability, that together we can make a difference, that we can
put people on top of unjust corporations and governments."
Hammond is accused of hacking into Strategic Forecasting, Inc. or
Stratfor. Stratfor is known as a for-profit corporate version of the
CIA. The files, consisting of e-mails and internal documents was posted
on WikiLeaks.

In describing the Stratfor documents, the Guardian
has described a number of ethical and possible legal violations the
company had made. The memo's show that Stratfor had been "seeking to
profit by disrupting journalists and activist groups," including groups
like the Bhopal Medical Appeal, which sought to protest DOW Chemical for
not cleaning up the toxic waste in Bhopal as a result of the Union
Carbide gas explosion in 1984.

The Guardian also points out that Stratfor's process of buying
information from government and corporate insiders and then seeking to
profit from that information could attract unwanted attention from the
Securities and Exchange Commission:

By its very nature, of course, such information is
secret and often protected by government order. Nothing short of a major
congressional investigation will be able to drill down into this
intelligence-industrial cartel to assess not just the quality
of the information and the way it was obtained, but whether or not any
of it serves the public interest—or the very opposite. That is, unless
Anonymous or WikiLeaks gets there and does the work first.

In many ways, whoever hacked Stratfor was living up the Hacker Credo
that "Information Wants to be Free." It has led to a number of questions
about the operations of a company that might put profit over ethics and
legality.

Hammond is also charged with charging the credit cards of Stratfor's
clients to various progressive groups. This has led some to call him a
digital Robin Hood. While some activists may cheer releasing corporate
information, many balk at using those corporate clients credit cards
without authorization.

However. the history of civil disobedience has shown that financial
tolls on powerful corporations and governments are often the most
effective form of protest. No one has accused Hammond of using the money
for himself. A "freegan" who protests the wastefulness of the food
industry by dumpster diving and eating food that has been thrown away,
he could have bought much nicer things for himself. Although, if he had
used the money on himself, he might have been able to evade capture by
the authorities by moving out of the country.

If Hammond did hack Stratfor, it is entirely possible that he was a
victim of entrapment. A target by the FBI because of his politics and
previous arrests, he may have been persuaded and pressured into hacking a
company that he might not have known of before. Considering the
possibility of corruption in Stratfor, Hammonds arrest should only fuel
the distrust of the government from many in the Anonymous and Occupy
movements.